In his day, Max Beerbohm was recognized as an incomparable observer of modern life and an essayist whose voice was always and only his own. Today, as the editor of this volume, Phillip Lopate has remarked, “it becomes all the more necessary to ponder how Beerbohm performed the delicate operation of displaying so much personality without lapsing into sticky confession.” Among the topics addressed are the vogue for Russian writers, laughter and philosophy, dandies, and George Bernard Shaw.
Contributors:
Phillip Lopate

This collection of thirty-seven interlocking essays ranges across more than four decades of reading to re-examine fundamental assumptions about literature today, from the status of the writer to the ability of fiction to change the world

Dyson's new collection includes reminiscences, lucid explanations of scientific concepts, and an engagingly imaginative approach to the triumphs, blunders, mysteries, and dreams of scientific inquiry into the natural world.

As a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1963 to 2001, Renata Adler reported on civil rights from Selma; on the war in Biafra, the Six-Day War, and the Vietnam War; on the Nixon impeachment and Congress. She has also written about cultural matters, films, books, politics, and pop music. This first comprehensive gathering of her work shows why she is among the finest American journalists of the last century—and of this one.
Contributors:
Michael Wolff

This collection of White's gardening columns, originally written for The New Yorker, has blossomed into a classic in its own right. Here is White's acerbic and irreverent take on everything from the unsung authors of seed packet copy to flower arranging, herbalists, and the pleasures of dreaming of future gardens. “Can be savored by the reader whose closest acquaintance with nature is the corner florist. It is a heady compost of observation, taste, wit, and scholarship.”—Time
Contributors:
E.B. White

One of contemporary America’s leading critics and scholars offers a provocative reassessment of the lives and work of eight influential twentieth-century American writers: Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, W.H. Auden, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, and Frank O’Hara.

Darryl Pinckney's first book in over ten years covers the participation of blacks in US electoral politics, from Reconstruction to the Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and what it may mean for the political influence of black voters in future elections.

Many of the filmmakers and artists Ian Buruma covers in his new collection, which focuses on the themes of war, film, and the visual arts, come from Germany and Japan and deal with World War II. What unifies the book is less the question of war itself than the way people deal with violence and cruelty, in the arts and in life.

There is no better to way to encounter Montaigne's searching, eloquent essays than as William Shakespeare did, in lyrical translation by his contemporary John Florio. Here noted Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt accompanies the texts with a learned and engaging essay, tracking Montaignian themes in such works as King Lear and The Tempest and setting his work in elegant context.
Contributors:
Stephen Greenblatt
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Peter Platt
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John Florio

On Being Blue is a book about everything blue—sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do.
Contributors:
Michael Gorra